the arrest of the physiological functions; but as sleep and syncope are often preceded by very pleasant sensations, why may not this also happen in natural death? Several facts prove it beyond dispute. It is even probable that the approach of natural death is one of the most pleasant sensations that can exist. It is indubitable that in a large number of cases of death, the cessation of life is associated with very painful sensations. One has only to see the horror shown in the faces o£ many dying people to be convinced of this, but there are diseases and serious accidents in which the approach of death does not arouse sorrowful sensations. I myself, in a crisis of intermittent fever, in which the temperature descended in a very short time from about 106° Fahr. to below normal, experienced a feeling of extraordinary weakness, certainly like that at the approach of death. This sensation was much more pleasant than painful. In two cases of serious morphia poisoning, my sensations were more agreeable; I felt a pleasant weakness, associated with a sensation of lightness of the body, as if I were floating in the air. Those who have noted the sensations of persons rescued from death have related similar facts. Prof. Heim, of Zurich, has described a fall in the mountains which nearly killed him, as well as several similar accidents to Alpine tourists. In all these cases he states that there was a sensation of pleasure.[103] Dr. Sollier has told of a young woman addicted to morphia, who had been convinced that she was at the point of death. On recovering from a most serious attack of syncope, from which she was restored only by giving another dose of morphia, she cried: “I seem to come from far away; how happy I was!” Another of Dr. Sollier’s patients, a lady who had an attack of peritonitis from which she expected to die, felt herself “suffused with a feeling of well-being, or rather the absence of all pain.” In a third Case of Dr. Sollier, a young woman suffering from puerperal fever, feeling herself at the point of death, had a similar sensation “of physical well-being and of detachment from everything.”[104] As a sensation of happiness occurs even in cases of pathological death, it is much more likely to occur in natural death. If natural death be preceded by the loss of the instinct of life and by the acquisition of a new instinct, it would be the best possible end compatible with the real organisation of human nature. I do not pretend to give the reader a finished study on natural death. This chapter of Thanatology, the science of death, only opens the subject; but it is already apparent that study of the circumstances of natural death in plants, in the animal world, and in human beings, may give facts of the highest interest to science and humanity. PART IV SHOULD WE TRY TO PROLONG HUMAN LIFE? I THE BENEFIT TO HUMANITY